NYFF. In the Realm of Oshima.

Come December, many lucky New Yorkers will likely look back on the New York Film Festival program In the Realm of Oshima as one of if not the major event of the year in film.

At Hammer to Nail, Nelson Kim offers a brief biography of the director known by most for a single film ("an excellent film, but something of a footnote to his major period: it's as if Godard were known only as the maker of Hail Mary") and previews seven of the 23 features:

Updated through 9/26.

These are the ones I'd consider essential viewing - but don't limit yourself to my picks: the retrospective is also showing several films that are nearly impossible to find in the US (including his first feature, A Town of Love and Hope). Nor should you stop at one or two and call it a day, convincing yourself that you've now "done" Oshima. Furiously self-reinventing, determined to avoid repeating himself or falling into cliché, he changed his style and mode of attack with each new film. As with the 60s films of Godard, to whom he's so often compared, the more you see, the more amazing the total achievement becomes. What's truly remarkable about his most fertile period isn't a single standout movie, or even two or three or four, but the body of work as a whole, considered as a continuous, restlessly innovative inquiry into the revolutionary potential of cinema.

As mentioned earlier, Film Comment is featuring online not only a piece on Oshima from its current issue but also three "online exclusives" taken from the archives. "Forty years ago Nagisa Oshima was one of the biggest names in world cinema, a brilliant modernist who made consistently electrifying films, each one radically different in form and style from the rest," writes Tony Rayns. "If he'd been French, he'd be as well known as Godard - and probably more influential.... [S]o the touring retrospective put together by James Quandt at the Cinematheque Ontario is an essential reassertion of his talent and importance."

The online exclusives: Rayns on In the Realm of the Senses, from the September/October 1976 issue, James Bouras on the censorship of that film (January/February 1977) and Chuck Stephens on Gohatto (November/December 2000).

Updates, 9/26: "With this once-towering figure almost in eclipse, it is hard to overstate the significance of In the Realm of Oshima, his first major retrospective in the United States in more than 20 years," writes Dennis Lim in the New York Times. "The retrospective, which will travel to about a dozen other North American cities, is a labor of love for its curator, James Quandt of the Cinematheque Ontario, who has worked on it for 10 years, tracking down obscure print sources and negotiating a tangle of rights problems. In the context of an amnesiac film culture, it is also a heroic intervention, a bid to safeguard a master's place in the canon."

David Phelps in the Auteurs' Notebook:

His films, which, in both senses of the term, "forge" just about any style, can be seen as formalist fuck-yous to society; they're often inquests into the failure of Japanese politics and history on even the most personal level, from Cruel Story of Youth's goon teen hooligans, Nick Ray's rebels given murderous cause, to The Ceremony's affected aristocrats, strung with all the hypocrisies of a ruling class pretending it's not dead. Politics inevitably infiltrates the private sphere, as characters seek an outlet for their wrath, itself the product of a society that has, so much of the time, betrayed its members politically and then demanded they closet their worst inhibitions. The outlet is sometimes rape and sometimes suicide, but always, needless to say, some form of exploitation that only leads to more betrayals; if Oshima's characters are so frequently betrayed by their own class, whatever class it is, it's all they can do to find people exactly like themselves to hurt. Like the characters of Tati or Antonioni or Resnais or Kubrick from the same period, Oshima's rebels really just rebel against anonymity—only to find doppelgangers everywhere.

More from Simon Abrams in the New York Press.

Chris Fujiwara at Moving Image Source on The Man Who Left His Will on Film: "With its images of stagnation that bewilder, bore, and vaguely frighten the on-screen viewers (the young members of the revolutionary film unit), the film-within-the-film provokes, and makes clear, a crisis of representation. In the nothing-to-see of these images is the premonition of a near future when there is nothing to do: when the adversary can be located only with difficulty, because it permeates all levels of the society, and when making revolution is no longer meaningful, because, like Hegel's slave, one has given up one's death."

Posted by dwhudson at September 22, 2008 3:39 PM